


Take my Hand (Take my Whole Life too)

by Marsipancity



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Character Death, Coma, Harry Styles as Death, Hospitalization, Hospitals, Louis Dies, M/M, Medical Inaccuracies, Sick Louis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-09
Updated: 2018-04-09
Packaged: 2019-04-20 18:45:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14267277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marsipancity/pseuds/Marsipancity
Summary: 'I have imagined death so much,That it feels like a memory'During his last days on life support, Louis recalls his time in the hospital and becoming familiarized with death himself- a man with thin grey skin and long brown hair.





	Take my Hand (Take my Whole Life too)

**Author's Note:**

> This reads more like prose than it is an actual ficlet. I wrote it during a slump with something else I'm working on. It's my first posted fic on here though! 
> 
> Please let me know if you find any errors, this piece is non-beta'd figuring it's so short 
> 
> Trigger warning for major character death, it is the primary baises for this work. Life support is the largest mentioned medical reason, with more triggers involving the dying process and medical equipment. 
> 
> All events are fictional and not meant to harm any mentioned parties.

He is cold and stern,  
With hands like shovels.  
He grabs and takes.  
He arrives early, dressed in his Sunday best.  
His eyes are covered in cowardice, pushing through bone. 

 

I have imagined death so much,  
That it feels like a memory. 

 

He tells me,  
‘I am a man  
I am the paper flesh and grinding bone.  
I am sickening, guts poured before me.  
I am disturbing to behold, sunken eyes, and sunken cheeks. 

I belong to the soil beneath me.  
And I am a man.  
Just as you.’ 

\-------------------------------  
I have been sick for a year, I have been medically dead for a week. I am laid in thin fresh linen with pristine clear tubes. I can hear but cannot see, cannot move. They are deciding what to do. People speak in hushed tones, worried voices. Machines sound their alarms and I do not sound mine. 

I wish someone would close the window. I wish they would close the blinds. It's too bright, It's too drafty. I know the nurses by the way they walk, can hear them coming down the hall with clunky shoes. I like Olivia best, she is small and walks lightly. She never brings the squeaky cart with the bad wheel.

My least favorite is Carolina, she thinks they should pull the plug. She puts it delicately, and is swaying my Mother to agree. Her voice is light and sympathetic, I know the inflections well enough to know she is not well meaning. 

And I- I do not know. I am seven days deep in a coma and I couldn't make the choice for myself. Sometimes, they leave the TV on all night, and I wish they would turn it off.  
Sometimes I wish they would turn me off. 

They have meetings at my bedside, I hear paper flipping, probably clipboards. I have very professional visitors that borrow my blood and take my pulse. They say my full name for new friends, talk about very personal information - how much I've pissed today, how much I’ve shit.

Mom thinks my hand moved today.  
It didn't. 

Because I don't move. I am a prisoner to my body. It's very isolating in a way, I have made myself a home behind my eyelids. I have no say in the decision they ultimately make. I wouldn't blame them if they unplugged me. They think I'll never make it out of this, and I don't know honestly. It's never been this bad. 

This time has a lot of tears, a lot of important questions, long tests and medication.  
Lottie says I just need rest, I need more time.  
It's not a decision anyone wants to make, nonetheless rush in to. 

For now, I find bliss. I find simple happiness as they close the window and tuck my feet in under the thin hospital blankets. 

A dying man doesn't lead a very exciting life. I don't have many more stories left in me.  
The only adventure I have left is death  
\--------------------------------

Harry is six or so feet tall. His stomach curves into his body, sinking against his guts. Sometimes you can see his intestines moving beneath his skin like rotten worms. It's repulsive and intriguing that his body hasn't busted open with rotting flesh and horrid gasses. His insides are coagulated ochre, like expired cake, crusted at the edges. His sinewy muscles ripple through exposed flesh, tearing back from him in betrayal.  
His face is caved in, cheekbones almost violently scooped out. He is a withered and horrid man, with horrid purple lips, and horrid moldy eyes. 

He smells like old leather and gasoline. Like a deep breath of pollution; like you had taken a guzzle from the business end of an exhaust pipe. His hair was probably once very beautiful, long and flowing. It barely holds on to the tight skin of his shiny scalp now, flowing in a tangled thin mess. 

His arms are rods. Thin little rods with misplaced hands, large and out of sorts with masculine knuckles and bleeding nail beds.  
You can almost count every time bone in them.

And then Harry died.  
Or so he says.  
He died and and now helps others die too. 

What a lovely and humble occupation.  
\------

God I am tired.  
More tired than usual, in my 18 hours of sleep. It's restless darkness, never fully slipping away. I will sleep when I am dead. 

Harry is a shadow in my mind. I do not know him on a first name basis yet. 

His body is tall and lean and fleshed out, he looks like a healthy man if you set aside his muted grey skin and skeleton mask.  
If I hadn't seen a man before, I might have even called him handsome. Having him swim around me feels like getting into a hot car with a leather interior. It's pleasant for a moment and beckons you, but quickly becomes unbearable, threatening even. 

Harry and I walk down the hall together like two ghost sometimes as the week progresses.  
He tells me it is my choice, to go with him.  
At night though, when all is still, I know the choice is his. He has the final say and I'm sure he has the power that be to make it happen. 

I wonder how a man like him would do it. I wonder if I will watch from the sidelines as my family cries. It seems so odd, like they haven't been preparing for it for a year. 

Perhaps the two of us will sit in the chairs in my room and cross our legs like afternoon tea, sipping at pleasantries as my mother flings herself over my willowed body. It would be terrible. 

My dear Harry, he has had a crush on me since I was twenty, his cold hand over mine, we take walks together into emergency rooms, into bathrooms to cough up blood, and into solitude to hide the symptoms. He's an awful gentleman and terribly persuasive. To think that death himself has charmed me into this life. He has charmed me into these four walls, these fifteen tubes and brittle body. 

On Thursday night, he sits with my soul on the bedside, peering down at myself. 

“Are you tired?” He ask, his voice soft, looking at me with spring eyes behind a skull mask. He hides his true self. 

He knows, of course I am. My body looks beat to hell. My arm is bruised where the phlebotomist fucked up the IV. It's not a good look, but Harry reminds me it won't matter. 

Death ask me what I will wear for my funeral, I tell him, I'm not picky. Maybe a heather grey suit with a flower in my pocket. 

“Flowers are nice, what kind of flower?” 

“Maybe peonies, or some rose buds with wildflowers” I tell him. It's easy to plan a funeral with him, he is in the business after all. 

“What would you want to tell your family?” He follows 

This one gets me. Because what would I say?  
‘Thanks for finally letting me rest’ 

It probably wouldn't be appropriate or very kind, so I revise. Something about love, not placing blame, moving on, such and such.  
I should be more upset, this should be awful, but the more Harry lays his layers of cloaks on me, the more comfortable I become. 

Death comes in layers.  
For me, the first layer was an onset of aches, like any other cold. Followed by fatigue, sickness, the hospital, and three comas prior to this one

Harry lays another sheer layer over me on Thursday night. He says perhaps Sunday will be ideal as we drift back down the hall, into the elevator and to the garden. My body lays still in the bed upstairs. There's nothing there for me to do. 

“I hate to take you, Louis.” He tells me, walking past snapdragons carefully as the edges of them dry. 

“Don't say that as if you haven't been following me for years.” 

“I've never followed this close.” 

“I much preferred it that way…” I pass right through the garden gate, feeling nothing. It is so wonderful to just feel nothing. 

Harry likes to apologize, guilty at his career, he doesn't seem to take it well. Must be a trainee, new on board. The numbers across his back say otherwise, ancient inky inscriptions tell me he's been around the block a few times. At least a few good centuries. 

He doesn't remember when he died, or how, I ask him if he wishes he did. 

“No, actually” 

“Why?” 

“Sometimes, when things are bad It's better you not know, better to forget.” 

At eight pm I am pulled back into my body as my lungs burn, the breathing tube feels a slight bit sharp down my esophagus as I try to choke it out. I'm given something warm and soothing as hell through my IV and slip back with Harry in my mind. He sits in the corner and I lay in his bed. 

Sunday morning, they pull back the curtains, the open the blinds. Summer is rolling in across england and I can't help but think what a lovely day to die. Harry takes me to see the clouds, to watch my toes above lush green grass, thin and soft. Dandelions and bees dapple into the earth and swing up into the air with the breeze. 

“Is today a good day?” He asks, asking permission.

“As good a day as ever.” 

“Are you ready though?” 

I hesitate a moment, and nod. I think I am. 

So the afternoon comes, with golden light though the window and my Mum holds my hand. Lottie watches the kids in the waiting room holding back tears. Some of them are too young to understand. 

There's this lovely red line, it peaks, flatens, peaks. It dances up and down then flat.  
And flat.  
And flat. 

My Mum tells me it's okay, to just rest, tells me she loves me so so much and tears stream down her face. 

Harry stands at my bedside and offers his hand. My legs work for the first time in months, My skin is warm again, I can breathe. 

“Are you ready, my love?” He ask, horrid facade fading, he is warm and light. His hair falls over his shoulders in luscious curls, over his runic back. He is so beautiful and I am so free. 

I take his hand.


End file.
